Thursday, March 13, 2014

Tools and Limitations

As I'm grinding through this A+ endeavor, I'm using the venerable CompTIA A+ Certification Exam Guide by Mike Meyers.  As far as I can tell this is the updated version of the one that's been around for years.

I've also got the CompTIA A+ Training Kit from Microsoft Press.  I looked at both before I ponied up for the hardcover Meyers book, since it seemed to start from a lower level and have a little more meat on it's bones, prose-wise, than the Microsoft book, which seemed to be written in a denser, just-the-facts type style.

I have the Microsoft book on EPUB, and it has uncovered one limitation of e-readers for technical materials that have a lot of diagrams, figures, etc.  The way the formatting breaks out it can be 5 pages or so before a diagram that is referenced shows up, and there's not an easy way to flip through the pages like with a dead tree version.

Having some experience, I do tend to prefer the Microsoft version, since it doesn't spend as much time on history and defunct standards like the Meyers book does.  Both are a pretty good complement to the other, but if I had to do it all over again, I might go with the printed version of the Microsoft manual.

What this world needs is a good, cheap, light, 8.5x11 e-reader screen that will display PDF files at normal page size.  I've found tons of great technical stuff online in all areas that are only on PDF, and again, the small screen size works against things that were meant to be printed in magazines.  And scaling up on the ereader is just kind of a hassle on most things, depending on layout.

No comments:

Post a Comment